It may become a biennial ritual. Every two years, if the
commander-in-chief (or the commander-in-chief-elect) says he
wants to throw more troops into an unwinnable war for no clear
reason other than his political advantage, panderer-in-chief
Robert Gates will shout “Outstanding!”

Never mind what the commanders in the field are saying — much
less the troops who will die.

After meeting in Canada on Friday with counterparts from
countries with troops in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Gates
emphasized to reporters there is a shared interest in “surging
as many forces as we can” into Afghanistan before the elections
there in late September 2009.

At the concluding news conference, Gates again drove home the
point, “It’s important that we have a surge of forces.”

Basking in the alleged success of the Iraq “surge,” Gates knows
a winning word when he hears one – whether the facts are with
him or not.

Although the conventional wisdom in Washington credits the
“surge” with reducing violence in Iraq, military analysts point
to other reasons – including Sunni tribes repudiating al-Qaeda
extremists before the “surge” and the de facto ethnic cleansing
of Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods.

In Washington political circles, there’s also little concern
about the 1,000 additional U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq
since President George W. Bush started the “surge” early in
2007. The Americans killed during the “surge” represent roughly
one-quarter of the total war dead whose numbers passed the 4,200
mark last week.

Nor is there much Washington commentary about what Bush’s
grotesque expenditure in blood and treasure will mean in the
long term, even as the Iraqis put the finishing touches on a
security pact that sets a firm deadline for a complete U.S.
military withdrawal by the end of 2011, wording that may be
Arabic for “thanks, but no thanks.”

Nor do most Americans know from reading the reports from their
Fawning Corporate Media that the “surge” was such a “success”
that the United States now has about 8,000 more troops in Iraq
than were there before it began.

The real “success” of the Iraq “surge” is proving to be that it
will let President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney leave
office on Jan. 20, 2009, without having to admit that they were
responsible for a strategic disaster. They can lay the blame for
failure on their successors.

Gates a Winner?

Gates stands to be another beneficiary of the Iraq “surge.”

Already, he has the Defense Secretary job. In November 2006, he
was plucked from the obscurity of his Texas A&M presidency and
put back into the international spotlight that he has always
craved because he was willing to front for the “surge” when even
Donald Rumsfeld was urging Bush to start a troop drawdown.

Now, the perceived “success” of the “surge” is giving hawkish
Washington Democrats an excuse to rally around Gates and urge
President-elect Barack Obama to keep him on.

Ever an accomplished bureaucrat, Gates is doing what he can to
strengthen his case.

On Friday, Gates seemed at pains to demonstrate that his
approach to Afghanistan is identical to the one publicly
espoused by his prospective new employer who is currently
reviewing Gates’s job application.

As he did with the Iraq “surge” over the past two years, Gates
now is talking up the prospects for an Afghan “surge.”

“The notion that things are out of control in Afghanistan or
that we’re sliding toward a disaster, I think, is far too
pessimistic,” Gates said.

Yet the argument that Gates used to support his relative
optimism makes us veteran intelligence officers gag — at least
those who remember the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1960s, the Soviets
in Afghanistan in the 1980s and other failed
counterinsurgencies.

“The Taliban holds no land in Afghanistan, and loses every time
it comes into contact with coalition forces,” Gates explained.

Our Secretary of Defense seemed to be insisting that U.S. troops
have not lost one pitched battle with the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

Engagements like the one on July 13, 2008, in which “insurgents”
attacked an outpost in Konar province, killing nine U.S.
soldiers and wounding 15 others, apparently do not qualify as
“contact,” but are merely “incidents.”

Gates ought to read up on Vietnam, for his words evoke a
similarly benighted comment by U.S. Army Col. Harry Summers
after that war had been lost.

In 1974, Summers was sent to Hanoi to try to resolve the status
of Americans still listed as missing. To his North Vietnamese
counterpart, Col. Tu, Summers made the mistake of bragging, “You
know, you never beat us on the battlefield.” Colonel Tu
responded, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

As Vietnamese Communist forces converged on Saigon in April
1975, the U.S. withdrew all remaining personnel. Summers was on
the last Marine helicopter to fly off the roof of the American
Embassy at 5:30 a.m. on April 30.

As he later recalled, "I was the second-to-the-last Army guy out
of Vietnam -- quite a searing experience."

More Vietnams?

Why is this relevant? Because if Obama repeats the mistakes of
Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, U.S. Marine
choppers may be plucking folks not only off the U.S. embassy
roof in Baghdad, but also from the mountains and valleys of
Afghanistan.

No ignoramus, Gates knows that his comment about the Taliban
losing “every time” that there is contact with coalition forces
is as irrelevant as those of Col. Summers 34 years ago.

Yet, it would be folly to expect Gates to give advice to a
superior that challenges the policies that Gates thinks his
superior favors. Gates has been a career careerist going back to
his days as head of analysis at CIA in the 1980s when he
fashioned intelligence reports that gave the policymakers what
they wanted to hear.

Instead of the old-fashioned “bark-on” intelligence, the Gates
variety was “apple-polished” intelligence.

Gates, who desperately wants to stay on as Defense Secretary,
apparently thinks that his life-long strategy of telling his
superiors what they want to hear will now work with Barack Obama.

Gates is nearing the end of a highly sophisticated campaign to
convince Obama and his advisers that the current Defense
Secretary is just who they need at the Pentagon to execute
Obama’s policies – and look really bipartisan to boot.

The President-elect’s position has long been that we need to
send “at least two additional brigades” (about 7,000 troops) to
Afghanistan. So the Defense Secretary would have us believe, as
he said Friday, that “surging as many forces as we can” is an
outstanding idea.

And with troops having to leave Iraqi cities by next June, in
the first stage of the U.S. withdrawal demanded by the draft
status-of-forces agreement, there will be more soldiers
available to send into the mountains of Afghanistan. Don’t you
love it when a plan comes together?

Ironically, this resembles closely the policy of Sen. John
McCain, who argued during the debate with Obama on Sept. 26 that
“the same [surge] strategy” that Gen. David Petraeus implemented
in Iraq is “going to have to be employed in Afghanistan.”

For good measure, Gov. Sarah Palin told Katie Couric “a surge in
Afghanistan also will lead us to victory there, as it has proven
to have done in Iraq.”

Reality Bites

Oops! Within a week, Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S.
commander in Afghanistan undercut McCain and Palin, insisting
emphatically that no Iraq-style “surge” of forces will end the
conflict in Afghanistan.

Speaking in Washington on Oct. 1, McKiernan employed unusual
candor in describing Afghanistan as “a far more complex
environment than I ever found in Iraq.” The country’s
mountainous terrain, rural population, poverty, illiteracy, 400
major tribal networks, and history of civil war make it a unique
challenge, he said.

“The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge,’ ” McKiernan
continued, adding that what is required is a “sustained
commitment” to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many
years and would ultimately require a political, not military,
solution.

McKiernan added that he doubts that “another facet of the Iraq
strategy” — the U.S. military’s programs to recruit tribes to
oppose insurgents — can be duplicated in Afghanistan. “I don’t
want the military to be engaging the tribes,” said McKiernan.

Recently, President-elect Obama has been relatively quiet on
Afghanistan, and one lives in hope that before he actually
commits to sending more brigades to Afghanistan he will assemble
a group of people who know something about that country, the
forces at play in the region and insurgency.

If he gathers the right people, and if he listens, it seems a
good bet that his campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan being the
good war will remain just that, rhetoric. But that, apparently,
is not yet.

Gates has only another week or so left to show the
President-elect that he thinks the ideas reflected in Obama’s
rhetoric are outstanding. And, as Gates’s predecessor Rumsfeld
might have put it, you have to go with the rhetoric you’ve got.
Right now, the word “surge” brings nods of approval at
influential dinner parties in Washington.

What does Gen. McKiernan know, anyway? Gates’s Pentagon says
that McKiernan now has requested three additional brigade combat
teams and additional aviation assets. And yet, he says he’s
allergic to a “surge”?

If past is precedent, Gen. McKiernan already realizes he has
little choice but to salute smartly, do what he is told, and not
diverge from what inexperienced civilians like Gates are
promoting. After all, didn’t McNamara know best in the early
days of Vietnam and didn’t Rumsfeld know best at the start of
the Iraq War?

As the saying goes about the military, if you are a hammer,
everything looks like a nail. If you are a general assigned a
mission — though it appear to be Mission Impossible — you salute
smartly and use those troops entrusted to you to do what armies
do. At least that has been the tradition since Vietnam.

Ambitious, but Empty Suits

I’m all for civilian control of the military. But I see much
more harm than good in political generals — like the anointed
David Petraeus — who give ample evidence of being interested,
first and foremost, in their own advancement.

Why do I say that? Because Petraeus, like McKiernan, knows
Afghanistan is another quagmire. But he won’t say it.

Rather than do the right thing and brief his superiors on the
realities of Afghanistan, Petraeus and the generals he has
promoted seem likely to follow the time-honored practice of
going along to get along.

In any event, none of them get killed or wounded. The vast
majority get promoted, so long as they keep any dissenting
thoughts to themselves.

It is the same pattern we witnessed regarding Vietnam. Although
the most senior military brass knew, as the French learned
before them, that the war/occupation could not be successful, no
senior officer had the integrity and courage to speak out and
try to halt the lunacy.

It will be interesting to see what McKiernan actually does, if
and when more troops are surged down his throat. If he has the
courage of his convictions, maybe he’ll quit.

As a former Army officer, I would love to see an Army general
display the courage that one saw in Admiral William Fallon,
former commander of CENTCOM, who openly refused to “do Iran” on
his watch, and got cashiered for it.

Two years ago, Army Generals John Abizaid and George Casey,
speaking on behalf of their senior commanders in the field,
pushed back strongly against the idea of adding more U.S. troops
to those already in Iraq. They finally succeeded in persuading
former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld of the merits of their
argument.

It was when Rumsfeld himself started to challenge Bush’s
determination not to lose Iraq on his watch (by dispatching more
troops) that Robert Gates was brought in to replace Rumsfeld,
relieve Abizaid and Casey from command, and help anoint Gen.
Petraeus as surge-savior. [For details on Rumsfeld’s break with
Bush, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Robert Gates: As Bad as
Rumsfeld?”]

The temporary respite provided by 30,000 additional troops
helped achieve the administration’s main purpose — deferring the
inevitable U.S. troop withdrawal (not in “victory” as Bush liked
to say, but by demand of the Iraqi government) until Bush and
Cheney were safely out of office.

As for Gates, what he does not know about Afghanistan and
insurgency could fill a medium-sized library. So could what
Gates does know about how to ingratiate himself with the next
level up.

If it is true that serious consideration is being given to
keeping Gates on past January, it will be interesting to see if
this kind of pandering eventually wins the day with the
President-elect.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He
also serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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